


The Girl Without a Face

by creatureofhobbit



Category: Pretty Little Liars
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-07
Updated: 2015-09-07
Packaged: 2018-04-19 15:18:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4751171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/creatureofhobbit/pseuds/creatureofhobbit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mona struggles with her actions the night Alison went missing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Girl Without a Face

Mona used to walk past the Dilaurentis house a lot, glancing at the windows, trying to see if she could catch a glimpse of Alison and her friends inside. She’d imagine herself in there with Alison, Hanna, Spencer, Aria and Emily, sharing secrets and jokes. But she knew it was never going to happen, that to them she would always be Loser Mona, the kid they wouldn’t be seen dead hanging out with.

Mona had tried to wean herself off that particular habit. What good was it doing her, walking past every day knowing she would never enter that world? Besides, it wasn’t as if there had been anything to see there anyway recently. Mona knew that Ali and her family had gone away for the summer, although from what she remembered Ali was supposed to be getting back that day. But even if she was there, Mona knew how Ali would react to seeing her – a disdainful curl of the lip, scornfully turning away, possibly a question about who Loser Mona thought she was walking past her house. 

The last few times she’d done it, though, Mona had enjoyed the feeling of walking past Alison’s house, imagining her looking over her shoulder, wondering who the person was who was sending her the messages signed A, wondering if the person was watching her right now. She wondered if Alison had any suspicions about who might be behind it. But she doubted that Alison would have suspected her. That was the one advantage of being Loser Mona, beneath Alison’s notice – she was probably about the last person Ali would ever suspect.

These thoughts raced through Mona’s mind as she approached the house, took in the figure with long blonde hair and a yellow top standing with her back to her. Mona heard Alison’s voice in her head calling her Loser Mona, saw all the times when Alison had laughed at her, the day she grabbed Aria’s hand and the two had run away from her in the street, flashed back to the time when the class were asked what absolute zero was and Alison had called out “The number of Mona’s friends!” She imagined Alison turning around, giving her that look as if to ask Mona who she thought she was walking the same streets as her. As Alison looked like she was about to turn around, a red mist swam before Mona’s eyes. Alison’s taunts rang in her ears as Mona picked up a shovel that someone had abandoned on the ground and swung it over her shoulder.

As the girl fell face down to the floor, Mona suddenly realised what she had done. Throwing the shovel to the ground, she ran back to her car, not turning to look back, just knowing she had to get out of there as fast as she could.

She didn’t know how long she had been driving around, following the route to the Lost Woods as if on autopilot. When she saw the figure approach her, for a moment Mona wondered if her guilt was causing her to imagine things. For one moment she even wondered if Alison was haunting her, before shaking her head and dismissing that as stupid. There were no such things as ghosts. Obviously she hadn’t hit Alison as hard as she thought she had, and Alison had been able to get up and walk away. And as she called out to Alison, acting as though she didn’t know what had happened, it was clear to Mona that Alison had no idea who had hit her, and Mona realised she could turn this to her advantage.

It was the moment that Mona had long dreamed of when she was younger, Alison being grateful to her in some way and deciding to ask her to join her group of friends. But Mona was past that stage by this time. “You can repay me...by staying gone,” she said. With Alison out of the way, Mona could breathe again. She would be Loser Mona no more; she could build a new life for herself doing everything Alison had told her to do to help her become more popular, without the same old taunts ringing in her ears. And without the two of them running into each other all the time, Mona wouldn’t have to face the daily reminder of what she had done, and Alison was less likely to get some kind of memory trigger that Mona had been the one to hit her.

It worked for a while. Mona was able to get on with her life, to become the Mona she had always dreamed of becoming. And she even had Hanna now, one of Alison’s best friends actually wanted to be friends with her. Finally things were starting to look up for her. Then one day, she came home from school to find her mother waiting for her.

“I wanted you to hear this from me instead of having to find out on the news. The St Germain family found a body in their garden this afternoon. Mona...They found Alison DiLaurentis.”

Leona had taken Mona’s reaction as merely shock at the news of Alison’s death. She had no way of knowing what thoughts were really going through Mona’s mind. If Alison had survived and made it to the Lost Woods Motel, whose body had Maya’s family found in the garden? Had there been two girls in the garden that night? If so, which one had Mona hit – had it been Alison as she thought or someone else entirely, and if so, who had it been? Had Mona taken the life of some innocent girl? Or if it had been Alison she had hit that night as she had always believed, who else had been there that night and had hit the other girl?

There was a good chance that Mona was never going to know for sure. So she had to keep believing that the girl she had hit had been Alison, that she hadn’t hit her that hard, that someone else had hit this other girl and Mona wasn’t a killer. It was the only way she could carry on.

She was Mona Vanderwaal, class Queen Bee, potential Ivy League student, beautiful and popular, and she was determined to stay that way. She would push all thoughts of the dead girl from her mind. Mona kept telling herself it was as if it was some other person – it had been Loser Mona who had hit Alison (yes, Alison); and Loser Mona didn’t exist any more. The Mona Vanderwaal she was today was a completely different person. In time, Mona truly felt she’d closed the door on what happened.

It was at her birthday party when the whole thing resurfaced again. A part of her had enjoyed pretending to Hanna that she’d had a text saying that Hanna had had liposuction and then publicly banning her from her party. How many times had that happened to her over the years, after all? Okay, so it had been Ali who had walked over to her that time holding out an invitation to her thirteenth birthday party, then laughed in her face, asked if Mona had really believed that she had meant it before walking away and handing the invitation to Riley right in front of her, but Hanna had been right there laughing along with her. That memory was at the forefront of Mona’s mind the day she confronted her in the corridor. She should have known that things with her and Hanna were never going to last, that Hanna was only going to go back to the other three bitches in the end.

She’d enjoyed wiping the smirk off Hanna’s face as she’d driven straight at her. But the next night, Mona awoke from a nightmare where she’d thought she was hitting Alison with the shovel once again, only for the person in the yellow top to turn around and reveal herself to be Hanna. She tried to brush it off, but then the next night found herself dreaming about driving straight at Alison. Mona knew that in order to stop the nightmares, she had to concentrate on being Queen Bee Mona and drive all thoughts of the other Mona from her mind. At first, that just resulted in yet another version of the nightmare where she found herself looking in the mirror expecting to see the Mona she had become, only to see Loser Mona’s face staring back, and wondering which Mona she truly was.

She’d been watching some movie or other when the news came in that the body found in the garden had been identified. Bethany Young, Mona thought to herself as the newscaster droned on about how she had escaped from Radley. She knew that name. Lesli had talked about her former roommate when they were in Radley together, how they had hated each other and it had got to the point where they had to move Bethany in with someone named Rhonda just to stop them fighting, and then Bethany had disappeared anyway. 

But even if she hadn’t had that background knowledge of Bethany, it would have still made it worse for Mona to finally have a name, for the person she may or may not have hit to become more real to her. The nightmares that had surfaced after she’d run over Hanna had by that time morphed into one where she saw herself hitting the person in a yellow top, the person turned round to face Mona only for her to see a figure with no face at all, or a face with a big chunk of it taken out by the shovel so that she couldn’t see who it was. Now Bethany’s face was all over the news coverage, it was her face that Mona saw in her nightmares. And yet she still couldn’t be sure; there was still the possibility that it was Alison she had hit, that she hadn’t taken Bethany’s life. But in some ways it had been easier when the body in the garden hadn’t had a face, when Mona didn’t have to think about the family and friends that she must have had, about the future that Mona could have taken from her. And when she was dating Mike, it was harder still, because every time she looked at him she thought about how she didn’t deserve him, wondered how he would react if he knew what she had done, imagined him turning away from her once he knew the truth.

The day when Charlotte DiLaurentis admitted that she had been the one who had struck Alison and Mona finally knew that it had been Bethany, Spencer’s comment that Bethany wasn’t innocent did nothing to make her feel any better. Bethany was innocent of any crime towards Mona herself, after all, and even if she had been responsible for the death of Toby’s mother, that hadn’t excused Mona taking her life.

The girls had all agreed that they would tell no one of Mona’s confession; while Toby would be told what really happened to his mother so that he no longer believed she had taken her own life, Mona’s role in Bethany’s death would not be shared. “You have the chance to get on with your life, Mona,” Hanna had said, “to be the Mona you always wanted to be.”

Mona wasn’t so sure whether she would find it so easy, or whether she would find it easier to look at herself in the mirror after coming clean. But for now, she would take the chance her friends had offered her, to build the life she had always wanted for herself.


End file.
